Reader Feedback Request: 10.5.2 Nightmare in need of solution

Long time site reader and frequent commentor, The Wizard, sent me an email last night about a problem that I don’t have a solution to. Since I know that there are many of you that have had problems with 10.5.2 (and yes, I understand that there are also many of you that haven’t had any problems – that’s great – but we’re looking for a fix here.), I thought I would post a segment of his email to see if anyone can help come up with a solution for this problem.

From The Wizard:

After upgrading my first generation mac mini to 10.5.2 my usb bluetooth dongle (an MSI) suddenly stopped working. I can see it in the system profiler but I can never get to turning the bluetooth on. I tried another one with no success. I tried resetting the PMU on my mini but it didn’t resolve the problem.

I downloaded the combo version of 10.5.2 upgrade for PPC (343 MB) from Apple and re-installed it this way (as a recommendation from my friend Adel, the mac geek who turned me to mac back in 2005). Afterwards I repaired the disk permissions and then restarted the machine.

I tried restarting with the usb dongle attached and without. Unfortunately, no success.

this problem will occur only on older machines including the 1st gen Mac mini that I am still proud of having. So, you won’t encounter a lot of users whining about it since a lot of Leopard users bought it on their new shiny intel macs.

Any help or should we report to Apple and wait for a fix along with 10.5.3 which may be a couple of months away. I have to keep my mobile phone in a safe place till then cos I won’t be able to make any syncs at all.

I was “surprisingly” successful to resolve my problem and get my bluetooth back on. And here is how:

While I was searching for bluetooth preferences to reset as Garth suggested above. I typed the word bluetooth into the finder search box. Among the results was the application called “Bluetooth Setup Assistant” found in Macintosh HD>System>Library>Coreservices. I opened it and it asked me right-away if I want to turn my bluetooth on or leave it off. I chose to turn it on and Voila That was impossible without this maneuver as the option in bluetooth preferences was unavailable to change (i.e. inactive) and I couldn’t figure out a way to turn it on. i.e. the computer sees and recognizes my USB bluetooth device but decided to keep it off and would never allow me to turn it on.

Now I have turned it back on and done my first sync with my K810 in weeks.

I will now try to restart my mini and see what happens. See you after the break

I had a little adventure resetting all the bluetooth related data on my mac OS X using an app in the developer apps called “Bluetooth Explorer” clicking on an option in it called “modify software configuration”. I told Michael about my adventure in a rather long email with screen captures. I will let him decide whether to post it or not.

Here I will just mention my final conclusion on this bluetooth 10.5.2 dilemma.

First I would like to thank Garth for pointing my attention towards resetting the bluetooth preferences that got me started.

Here is my conclusion below:

Apple did something to the security of Mac OS X in 10.5.2 to automatically turn off 3rd party bluetooth devices once there is any paired devices present. And also deactivated turning it back on from the menu bar or from the preferences pane. Why and how? I don’t know. But this seems to be the case after all what I went through.

My solution is:

You have paired devices means that you have an automatically switched off 3rd party bluetooth dongle. So to solve that do the following:

1. To turn it on just launch the “Bluetooth Setup Assistant” and click turn on then quit it. (found at Macintosh HD>System>Library>Coreservices). You’d better have it ready in your dock or overflow like I did.

2. To turn the bluetooth off just unplug your usb dongle.

End of story.

I would like to thank Michael very much for his time and his concern. Apple Gazette will always be my favorite Apple related blog and the one I always read or listen to first. Thank you Michael.